Writers Festival: Reading Essayistically
- Posted:
- August 29th, 2009
- Editor
- - AEST
Reading Essayistically: Toward an Ethics of Reading and an Open-ended Philosophy
Presented by Michelle Boulous Walker, University of Queensland
An exploration of what an open-ended philosophy might be from the perspective of how we read. If reading is a performance that can be judged in ethical terms, then reading essayistically (or in the mode of the essay) suggests a model of open-ended rumination that takes its time and returns – time and time again – to the matter at hand. Such a reading thwarts our modern preoccupation with speed and haste, and opens us to the wondrous space of a slow engagement that welcomes thought. Just as the essay engages its topic in ways that meander luxuriously through time and space, so too does reading essayistically open philosophy – or thought – to an indeterminate space from which the ethics of a “receptive attitude” or “patient attention to the other” may emerge. As such, philosophy can be enticed to relax its anxiety to know and to know fully (in the manner of the neurotic), and come that bit closer to being an infinite and wondrous engagement with life.
Chaired by Nick Trakakis, School of Philosophy and Bioethics.
Further information: Melbourne Writers Festival